2013年12月23日 星期一

Osborne and the Stooges

Op-Ed Columnist

Osborne and the Stooges

ByPAUL KRUGMANDecember 24, 2013

专栏作者

英国的紧缩政策赢了政治输了经济

保罗·克鲁格曼 2013年12月24日

There was, I’m
pretty sure, an episode of “The Three Stooges” in which Curly kept
banging his head against a wall. When Moe asked him why, he replied,
“Because it feels so good when I stop.”

《活宝三人组》(The Three Stooges)里有一集，我记得相当清楚，科里(Curly)不停地用脑袋撞墙。莫(Moe)问他为什么那样，他回答：“这样一停下来感觉就特别好。”

Well, I thought it
was funny. But I never imagined that Curly’s logic would one day become
the main rationale that senior finance officials use to defend their
disastrous policies.

我觉得这很好笑。但我从来没想过，有朝一日高级财政官员在为自己的灾难性政策辩护时，科里的逻辑会成为他们的主要理据。

Some background: In
2010, most of the nation’s wealthy nations, although still deeply
depressed in the wake of the financial crisis, turned to fiscal
austerity: slashing spending and, in some cases, raising taxes in an
effort to reduce budget deficits that had surged as their economies
collapsed. Basic economics said that austerity in an already depressed
economy would deepen the depression. But the “austerians,” as many of us
began calling them, insisted that spending cuts would lead to economic
expansion, because they would improve business confidence.

The result came as
close to a controlled experiment as one ever gets in macroeconomics.
Three years went by, and the confidence fairy never made an appearance.
In Europe, where the austerian ideology took hold most firmly, the
nascent economic recovery soon turned into a double-dip recession. In
fact, at this point key measures of economic performance in both the euro areaand Britain are lagging behind where they were at this stage of the Great Depression.

It’s true that the
human cost has been nothing like what happened in the 1930s. But that’s
thanks to government policies like employment protection and a strong
social safety net — the very policies austerians insisted must be
dismantled in the name of “structural reform.”

The depressing
effect of austerity in a slump is, in short, as clear a story as
anything in the annals of economic history. But the austerians were
never going to admit their error. (In my experience, almost nobody ever
does.) And now they’ve seized on the latest data to claim vindication,
after all. You see, some austerity countries have started growing again.
Britain appears to be experiencing a significant bounce; Ireland has
finally had a decent quarter; even Spain’s economy is showing faint signs of life. And the austerians are holding victory parades.

Perhaps the most
brazen example is George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer,
and the prime mover behind his country’s austerity agenda. No sooner
had positive growth numbers appeared than Mr. Osborne declared that “Those in favor of a Plan B” — that is, an alternative to austerity — “have lost the argument.”

这其中最厚颜无耻的大概是英国财政大臣乔治·奥斯本( George Osborne)，该国紧缩大业的头号推动者。一等积极的增长数据出现，奥斯本先生立马宣布“那些支持B计划的人”——即紧缩党人的反对者——“输了这场辩论。”

O.K., let’s think
about this claim, above and beyond the general observation that
fluctuations over the course of a quarter or two generally don’t tell
you much.

好吧，且不提一两个季度的波动并不能说明多少问题这个常理，我们来看看他的说法。

First of all,
Britain’s recent growth doesn’t change the reality that almost six years
have passed since the nation entered recession, and real G.D.P. is
still below its previous peak. Taking the long view, that’s still a
story of dismal failure — as I said, a track record worse than Britain’s
performance in the Great Depression.

Second, it’s
important to understand the history of austerity in Mr. Osborne’s
Britain. His government spent its first two years doing big things:
sharply reducing public investment, increasing the national sales tax,
and more. After that it slowed the pace; it didn’t reverse austerity,
but it didn’t make it much more severe than it already was.

And here’s the
thing: Economies do tend to grow unless they keep being hit by adverse
shocks. It’s not surprising, then, that the British economy eventually
picked up once Mr. Osborne let up on the punishment.

问题是这样：除非不停地被不利因素打击，经济本来就是倾向于增长的。那么奥斯本先生暂时停止惩罚后，英国的经济终于开始抬头，其实并不意外。

But is this a
vindication of his austerity policies? Only if you accept Three Stooges
logic, in which it makes sense to keep banging your head against a wall
because it feels good when you stop.

但这是他的紧缩政策生效的证明吗？除非你接受活宝三人组逻辑，按照那个逻辑，不停地拿脑袋撞墙是可以理解的行为，因为一旦停下来就舒服了。

Now, I’m well aware that the austerians may win political points all the same. Political scientists tell us
that voters are myopic, that they judge leaders based on economic
growth in the year or so before an election, not on overall performance
in office. So a government can preside over years of depression, yet win
re-election if it can engineer an uptick late in the game.